Make every click count

Sign up to PPC and get a discount on landing pages

PPC Strategy: Budgeting

Pay-Per-Click advertising changed the Web. The perfect fit for the new point and click, instant gratification Internet world – and advertisers flocked (and still do) to suppliers both big and small. What was missing, however, was a strategy. Many advertisers got burnt, and that alone was enough to dissuade the majority from using the advertising technique. Either their website design wasn’t, or their strategy was all wrong.

Fundamental PPC Strategies For Every Advertiser

Implementing strict budgeting rules to your PPC campaign is an exceptional way to derive more value from your advertising spend. Among the most straightforward strategies is to set a monthly budget and divide it among your advertising channels, but daily budgets may also help as they allow advertisers to throttle the traffic and disperse it during the month – something that as a monthly budget alone can’t accomplish.

In line with budgeting, sophisticated advertisers are testing the waters with day parting wherein bidding plans are changed during the day and possibly turning off bids at different times of the day – perfect for businesses that want calls during regular business hours or those that want to avoid international traffic. The savviest advertisers (those who understand the buying cycles of advertisers even take part in day excluding. E-Commerce websites are some of the most common users of day exclusion since they can minimise costs if regular shipping choices become too intense.

PPC Strategy: Bidding

The gist of PPC is bidding, but there are lots of advanced PPC bidding strategies that are not used by the vast majority of advertisers. It’s a fundamental principle of Web marketing, which higher on the SERPs is better, so the initial position must be the best.

Bidding to the position is common, but based on the keywords can become cost prohibitive as bidding wars and offer inflation response. As such, requiring your campaign be in the first position on every keyword isn’t suggested. Instead, bidding to only the second and third ranks, while driving less traffic lowers the cost of visitors considerable. Focus on the top 3 positions will be less competitive for bids, but rely on much less traffic than positions 1-3 can offer. There are much greater bidding strategies to use however than bidding to rank.

Bidding to your enterprises specific ROI goals is the best PPC bidding strategy. Although it’s necessary to pre-defined performance metrics for every keyword, understanding the maximum amount you’re able to spend on the whole while still turning a profit is the choice of many professional PPC marketers and advertisers. The most successful PPC management agencies take great care in understanding your business model, product pricing and sales funnel to comprehend the bid threshold.

PPC Strategies: Keywords

Website Magazine has discussed keywords and match types specifically at great length. Considering both Yahoo and Google have some form of keyword matching deployed on their platforms, it is vital to understand these features and leverage them for the betterment of their PPC campaign initiatives.

PPC Strategies: Ad Copy

Much like the price is the easiest factor to alter to check conversion, Ad copy is an integral part of PPC strategy and one that can make all the difference in the success of a keyword and an entire campaign. Once you become knowledgeable about the more fundamental PPC strategies, engaging in adding keywords dynamically into listings can be very beneficial. Each PPC platform, both on the first and second tier have particular keyword insertion rules, so be sure you’re setting up campaigns correctly before going life (more on that in a later post). Other tips for stellar ad copy include creating versions, utilising capitalisation, changing based on seasonality and including geo-centric references to search queries.

Need a long term strategy?

Need a long term strategy?

PPC is great at getting instant and tangible results but if your interested in the long term you should also be looking to invest in SEO for your website design.